Richard Nixon's White House had a speech prepared in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became stranded on the lunar surface, and the speech written by William Safire begins "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace," and the contingency plan had NASA ending communications with the lunar module, leaving Michael Collins as the only Apollo 11 astronaut able to return to Earth.

Two days before Apollo 11’s lunar landing on 20 July 1969, William Safire, a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, sent a short memo to the President’s Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman. It was dated 18 July 1969. It was titled “IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER”.

The document set out what Richard Nixon would say to the country if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were stranded on the lunar surface. It also set out what was to happen before and after the address. A copy is held in the Nixon presidential library exhibit material at the National Archives.

The memo went unused.

For almost thirty years, it remained largely unknown to the public.

What the speech actually said

The opening line is the one usually quoted. “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.” The speech then names Armstrong and Aldrin directly, acknowledges that “there is no hope for their recovery”, and frames their deaths as a sacrifice for what it calls humanity’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

It is short. Twelve sentences in total. Safire later said in interviews and in his own New York Times essay that he had borrowed the closing image from Rupert Brooke’s First World War poem “The Soldier”, with its line about a corner of a foreign field that is forever England. Safire’s version reads that anyone who looks up at the moon in the nights to come “will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind”.

It is a careful piece of writing, not a euphoric one. Safire said he had been told the riskiest part of the Apollo 11 mission was not the landing, but the ascent of the lunar module back into lunar orbit to rendezvous with the command module. If the ascent engine failed, there was no rescue capability and no second chance.

The instructions around the speech

The Safire memo is more than a speech draft. It also lays out the choreography of a national bereavement, as the full transcript of the memo confirms.

Before the address, Nixon was to telephone what the memo calls “the widows-to-be”. After the address, NASA was to end communications with the stranded crew. A clergyman was then to adopt the procedure of a burial at sea, commending the souls of the two astronauts to “the deepest of the deep” and concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.

The detail that has unsettled later readers is the ending of communications. In the contingency, Armstrong and Aldrin would still have been alive on the lunar surface at that point. Cutting off the radio was a deliberate procedural step, not a technical limitation. It is the closest thing in the document to a public-facing protocol for accepting that two men could not be brought home.

The third astronaut

The memo does not mention Michael Collins by name. He was the command module pilot, the one who did not descend to the surface. While Armstrong and Aldrin were on the moon, Collins flew the command module alone in lunar orbit, including the long stretches each orbit when he passed behind the moon and lost contact with mission control.

In the scenario the memo prepares for, Collins was the only Apollo 11 astronaut still in a spacecraft capable of returning to Earth. Collins had trained for emergency scenarios involving a failed lunar ascent and a one-man return. The Safire memo did not need to spell out the physics. It only had to address the loss.

How the memo came to light

The document sat in the Nixon files for almost three decades. According to Live Science’s account of the memo’s history, the historian James Mann came across it in the late 1990s while working through Nixon administration archives for a book on the United States and China. He wrote about it in the Los Angeles Times under the heading “The Story of a Tragedy That Was Not to Be”. A week later, Safire wrote his own account in the New York Times.

That is how a document with no operational consequence became one of the better known pieces of writing associated with Apollo 11. The mission worked. The speech sat in a folder. When it surfaced, its weight came from what had been quietly assumed at the top of the United States government at the time, that the men who had been sent might not come home, and that the institutional response had been drafted in advance.

What the document is, and is not

The memo is sometimes cited as evidence that Apollo 11 was reckless, or that the astronauts were unaware of the risks. Neither claim is supported by the document itself.

In our reading, it shows the opposite. The risks were understood plainly, including in the West Wing, and contingency planning extended past engineering review into language a president could deliver on television within hours of a failure. The speech is what risk acceptance looks like at the level of the state.

That frame is now relevant again. With Artemis, with crewed commercial missions to low Earth orbit and beyond, and with discussions of long-duration lunar surface operations, the question of how governments prepare for the loss of a crew has not disappeared. The 1969 memo remains the most-cited surviving example of how one administration thought about it.

The original document, in Safire’s typing, sits in the archives. The speech itself has now been read aloud in more commemorations, podcasts, and recorded performances than would have been imaginable on the morning the mission concluded successfully, when the memo was filed away because it was not needed.